A new intellectual biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay, showing how nineteenth-century British liberal culture retained and transformed the ideas of the Enlightenment in a rapidly changing world.

A new reading of a crucial chapter in the history of social and political thought – the transition from the late Enlightenment to early liberalism.

Political and economic liberalism has generally been considered to be of marginal import in France, but at an intellectual level, it is a different story. In this important new collection, Robert Leroux brings together key works, both from widely regarded and lesser known authors, whose thinking constituted the core of a singular intellectual movement.